Testing Red Hat Beta (Limbo)

Finally, I found some time to install and play with Red Hat Beta (Limbo). As far as I understood, it’s gonna be Red Hat Linux 8.0 when done, because it is compiled with new gcc, thus being not fully binary compatible with previous releases. Here is a small review o’mine.

Mostly, everything is covered in Release Notes. As they mention, framebuffer installation is replaced by the native X one. Media check is much suggested by the installation process before you proceed. UI interface is based on new gnome/gtk, which makes it look even nicer. Disk partitioning has a couple of new options: first, you can do LVM volumes from now on, and second, you can disable display of RAID partitions and LVM volumes.

Another new thing (?) is a suggested minimum of 75 MB for /boot partition. While I think it’s a bit excessive, there should not be a problem with modern drives.

Lots of work has been done in the area of package selection. Much cleaner interface and boasted xml comp file. One thing I found strange, is Midnight Commader being placed in Text-based Internet utilities group. Arguable though. While I played with package selection, I have noticed a squirellmail web-mail package in one of the groups. Excellent!

Kernel developemnt group of packages got a new icon with the pictureof Marcello.

After playing with the selection, I went for full install, which promised to be 4,758 MB. That helped me to notice that ISO images are actually 700 MB, instead of 650 as they used to be. Installation time of all packages on my system lasted for about an hour. I really enjoyed new ads while the process. Fortunes were really nice and refreshing.

Distro appeared to be usable even on my PII/350MHz with 256 MB of RAM. Both Gnome and KDE looked fine. OpenOffice.org works out of the box. Evolution too. There is now a tool for changing resolution and color depth too. I really look forward for the final release. It will be The Distribution for desktop use.